Why isn't the government closing the digital divide?

Wednesday 4 November 2009 15.00 EST
First published on Wednesday 4 November 2009 15.00 EST

Because it is failing to match high-level policy with funding where it's needed.

Martha Lane Fox's appointment as the government's digital inclusion champion was supposed to usher in a new era of coordinated effort to get 6 million "digitally excluded" Britons online by 2012. However, it seems that heads still need to be banged together: last Friday, five UK Online centres set up by a member of Lane Fox's own digital inclusion task force went into liquidation, because funds are not available on the ground to meet the government's high-level aspirations.

Catherine Marshall, then a single mother, set up The Lighthouse Project(not to be confused with the similarly named substance abuse help scheme) in the West Midlands in 1997. The idea was to provide a "safe and welcoming place where people could meet and find the support they needed". The project set up five centres, offering people from socially excluded communities free IT-based courses ranging from "First time Online" to a 10-week family history course. They also helped attendees gain literacy and numeracy qualifications online.

Research published last year showed that such schemes can help people rebuild their lives. "Participants were more likely to feel confident, and 40% had progressed into further training, employment, information, advice and guidance," it noted. In the words of one Lighthouse graduate: "I was in a right state – some days I was waking up in the afternoon and I'd get straight on the booze. At my lowest, I got into the habit of cutting myself too – I'm not proud of that. I was in a hole, and I needed shaking out of it."

Lane Fox visited Lighthouse in August and says it did "a fantastic job".

This year, Marshall became the grassroots organisations representative on Lane Fox's Digital Inclusion Task Force, which aims to get the hardest-to-reach Britons online by 2012. Nearly everyone thinks efforts such as The Lighthouse Project are the way to do it. The trouble is, they rely on funding from local authorities and other agencies. Marshall says the crunch came in July when £78,000 of expected local authority funding was diverted to the government's "worklessness" programme. "It set off a slow domino effect, which we weren't able to avoid." Despite repeated efforts to raise funds through other sources, Lighthouse's 45 staff were made redundant last Friday.

Marshall says that closing down the centres will cost the public purse more in redundancy payments and benefits than the money saved: "It makes no sense at all." With the help of volunteers, she plans to refer Lighthouse's 2,000 clients to other support schemes and use her role on the task force to raise awareness charities' work in promoting digital inclusion.